More Spring Cleaning

Thanks for the great comments on the "Spring Cleaning" post. I thought I'd answer up front here to make sure everyone sees it. Please keep the conversation going:

Anonymous - Please email me personally (nanbarber a gmail) about your "tough love" post.

Penny - congrats on the A5! Now are you going to give us the name of that Web site, or keep it all to yourself?

To "Will Not Sign" - We all share your struggle! We feel your pain. Many busy people use a combination of a Filo and electronic device and an online calendar. You might keep contacts on the handheld; there's really nothing better, and it will take some bulk out of the Filo. An online calendar like iCal is great for a monthly view and sharing with co-workers. Nothing wrong with using that at your computer and a more detailed daily or weekly schedule in your Filo.

My advice is not to worry about synching everything up. It's usually not necessary. Don't make the mistake I made. If you can easily print iCal pages that fit in your Filo, fine, but don't go crazy tinkering with the formatting. I wasted an entire week of my life that way! Now instead of trying to keep everything in iCal and print to my Filo, I keep work appointments and deadlines in iCal (actually, we're switching to a shared calendar system at work called Zimbra); I'm always at a computer for work, anyway. I keep a bare minimum in the online calendar, and write everything else down. That works for me.

Speaking of deadlines, I've got to run. But I'm still grappling with the loss of an outlet for my creative engines. Keeping my journal and ideas in an A5 Filo that I always had with me just made the ideas flow. It also meant I could use cool A5 notebooks with detachable pages and group related pages later. Sounds perfect, right? Not necessarily. More on that next time.